“It’s not rewilding, it’s not restoration, it’s resurrection. If you want to recreate a woodland you’ve got to plan it and plant your own trees. Here it’s all ready to go, like an instant cake mix – just add water.” UCL geographers are restoring Ice Age ponds www.theguardian.com/environment/...

‘It is not too much to say that the modern environmental movement is itself a grandchild of romanticism and post-frontier ideology. To gain such remarkable influence, the concept of wilderness had to become loaded: it had to become sacred.’ — William Cronon www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trou...

‘All these authors write in a way that feels inescapably post-internet, and that essentially com[es] from a place of fear: a fear that you will misunderstand, get frustrated, get bored, get outraged; that you will put the book down and go back to your phone.’ www.vulture.com/article/jord...

‘When I left the office that day, all I could do was replay the last few weeks in my head. I thought about the traumatic reenactments I had subjected my sources to, to no particular end.’ On fact-checking a genocide that your American colleagues refuse to name. bidoun.org/articles/hou...

A 10x revenue sale (or more!) for a 3-yea-old company that has yet to generate a profit and has no proprietary technology. (The Free Press has about 155,000 paying subscribers according to a recent Axios report, and costs $100/year.)

Truly we live in a glorious age for extremely cursed lecture events. Which is worse: Curtis Yarvin, Alain de Botton, some antivaxxers and a Rees-Mogg in a field, soundtracked by The Orb or Peter Thiel on being the Antichrist

Owls In Towels: a truly flawless subreddit. www.reddit.com/r/owlsintowe...

'One study published last year found that in the Las Vegas area, a staggering 49 percent of deaths among homeless people from 2015 to 2022 were attributable to heat.' @maggieastor.bsky.social joins a medical outreach team in Phoenix doing lifesaving work. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/w...

What the fuck? “We have had the police knocking on every door,” said a Cotswolds resident. “They wanted the names of everybody living there and details of their social media. [They] said it will all be passed to the American security people.” Re JD Vance’s holiday observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Lede of the year, jesus christ: ‘It is a sunny Sunday in June and I am sitting in a Porsche with a man I recently matched with on Bumble, two Spanish sighthounds, an intersex DJ and Curtis Yarvin. “Let’s go Team Fascist!” shouts my match as he pulls away.’ Sharing link: on.ft.com/4m5rTV4

Welcome to Media Fragmentation Summer: no vibes, no trends, and the closest thing we get to a shared cultural experience is the Jet2 Holidays ad and Coldplaygate 🫠 By @amandahoover.bsky.social www.businessinsider.com/brain-rot-su...

if we have a butlerian jihad against chatGPT can we call it Em-Daesh

‘The ingenuity and diversity of wasps’ nests is breathtaking. But the sense of disgust also lingers, and it may be worth lingering with it, as disgust is interesting … The industry on display is undeniable, so why is it hard to love?’ By @willwiles.bsky.social apollo-magazine.com/wasps-nests-...

‘Humans are permeable creatures, and we navigate the world like cleaner fish, filtering the waste of civilization partly by absorbing it.’ New from @dwallacewells.bsky.social: You Are Contaminated. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/o...

“The Alps remind me of the mountains of my childhood. They feel like home.” — Alem Big Qaderi, from Afghanistan @stephglinski.bsky.social on Peaks4All, a project supporting refugees in Switzerland through mountaineering. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

What will drone transport on Everest mean for Sherpa mountaineers? Xenon-assisted climbing may be an unnecessary innovation but this isn’t: it means less gear-hauling and more safety, says @markhorrell.bsky.social www.markhorrell.com/blog/2025/wh...

Where next for the nature memoir? Less of ‘these neat, linear narratives that have become such a staple of nature writing, but don’t represent human experience’? More ‘resisting linear progression, or redemptive arcs, in favour of the cyclical and the messy’? www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

Why did National Geographic disappear its own documentary about the queer climate scientist and mountaineer Dr. Alison Criscitiello? They don’t give @evaholland.bsky.social an answer but we can all guess. defector.com/why-did-nati...

The Rise of Vaporwave Curating ‘At a time of so many deepening crises, why are we afraid of saying what we really mean?’ asks Rahel Aima. www.frieze.com/article/rise...

'... One of Starmer’s wider weaknesses: he is committed to following the letter of the law, but unwilling to take the risk of arguing for the underlying principles.' @trillingual.bsky.social on the human rights lawyer who doesn't defend human rights: www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

‘The essential problem is this: in regular life, we have never been required to distinguish between “language” and “thought” because only thought was capable of producing language, in any but the most trivial sense.’ @rusty.todayintabs.com on generative AI www.todayintabs.com/p/we-need-to...

‘Let me answer not with comfort but with clarity,’ says ChatGPT — before detailing blood-letting rituals and offering to create ‘a printable PDF version with altar layout, sigil templates, and priestly vow scroll.’ @lilashroff.bsky.social reports: www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

‘As the pursuit of sexual connections became increasingly digitized, a palpable longing began to emerge, not for the moral repression that brought cruising into being but for its qualities of anonymity and spontaneity.’ Emily Witt www.newyorker.com/culture/anna...

‘If the hipster represents cultural taste as sorting algorithm, and the nerd represents cultural taste determined by sorting algorithm, the zombie is the point at which we start directly consuming the sorting algorithm itself.’ Sam Kriss: samkriss.substack.com/p/in-my-zomb...

A powerful piece from Huw Lemmey on the UK government’s criminalisation of non-violent protest group Palestine Action, and the Quaker obligation ‘to wage peace’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Counterargument: you never just posted on Twitter for direct-from-Twitter traffic. You posted on Twitter to seed your articles into the entire online ecosystem: I) Reach journalists & writers who’d put the piece in their recommended reads lists, driving referral traffic

Counterargument: Not if total electricity demand keeps growing faster than renewable supply. @gregor.us with the numbers (4.0% and 16.77% respectively). www.coldeye.earth/p/not-fast-e... 🔗 via @changeist.bsky.social

‘Objectivity’ is an obsolete mid-C20 newspaper marketing strategy and the NYT’s attempts to deliver it ‘mean skewing further and further right, with disastrous results. A Reddit mod has a better grasp of how this works than any Times editor.’ @lopatto.bsky.social www.theverge.com/culture/7000...

‘Globally, roughly a third more power is being generated from the sun this spring than last. If this exponential rate of growth can continue, we will soon live in a very different world.’ @billmckibben.bsky.social on the staggering pace of change for renewables. www.newyorker.com/news/annals-...

How to be a best-selling British nature writer: write memoir, misery memoir. Make as much of it up as you need. (That old LiveJournal classic of mysteriously coming and going terminal disease.) A fine investigation by @chloehadj.bsky.social observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Seagulls are urbanising (easier access to chips). Ok, also 'warming seas, falls in their prey species, changing in fishing practices, more violent winter storms'. By @estheraddley.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/environment/...

This is a particularly elegant and moving short piece we’ve published this week, and you should read it. By the Iranian novelist Amir Ahmadi Arian. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ju...

TFW you are financially modelling ethnic cleansing. @stephenfoleyft.bsky.social investigates Boston Consulting Group’s $4 million of contracted work to set up the Gaza ‘Humanitarian’ Foundation and model Palestinian ‘relocation’. on.ft.com/44Fr9yO

‘The great paradox of health prevention is that although a mountain of evidence has long shown it works, very little of it actually occurs.’ Because we live in a country that refuses to invest in the future (because that means tax increases or borrowing). www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

‘The delicacy and expressiveness with which Albany Hancock drew the Cullercoats oarfish testify to a kind of tenderness, a practice of totally focused observation which looks a bit like love.’ @pdkmitchell.bsky.social on encounters in the archive: open.substack.com/pub/corridor...

‘Medieval’ levels of untreated illness and young women repeatedly self-harming in order to get a safe hospital bed for the night. @joshhalliday.bsky.social on health crisis in Blackpool and Barrow – and the community nurses knocking on doors to try & shift this. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Interesting: @jameskanag.bsky.social on the political geography of occupational exposure to AI job risk. ‘Executive Britain’ in Richmond, Wimbledon and Highgate ‘looks like it is in for an incredibly tough decade.’ politicalwhiteboard.substack.com/p/the-collar...

‘Climate-driven financial havoc, even if it happens in slow motion, could be more menacing than past financial chaos. This type of climate risk is not cyclical. It’s heading in one direction.’ @pilitaclark.bsky.social on how the next financial crisis starts Gift link: on.ft.com/4ljPKQi

PLAYABILITY: @thejaymo.net astute on how ‘increasingly media mediums are playable.’ ‘Fortnite kids comb patch notes; TikTok creators speedrun trend cycles; memecoin traders farm the real time attention economy.’ The entertainment isn’t content but playing the system. thejaymo.net/2025/06/22/3...

‘If killing 23 civilians at an aid distribution site is not terrorism, how can we possibly be expected to accept that spray-painting a plane is?’ I continue to admire Sally Rooney’s nonfiction www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“A Border Patrol agent was walking the agency’s emotional support dog around the conference perimeter. Willow’s presence elicited coos of sympathy from agents whose job it is to impart unshakeable traumas.” N+1 went to an ICE job fair. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

‘The same quality of languid abstraction, of weak feeling unmoored from thought, that came to characterize so much media in the imperial years of the platform era is now the state’s official authoritarian style.’ @mitchtherieau.bsky.social on agit-slop: www.thedriftmag.com/agit-slop/

‘This week’s protests have been visible on social media, but their portrayals are fragmented, strange, and to people on the ground, often absurdly divorced from reality. If social media used to work for activists, or could, now it’s more effectively used against them.’ nymag.com/intelligence...

Oura ring not making you neurotic enough? Strap a pair of smart glasses to your face and they’ll analyse your facial micro-expressions and chide you about your chewing. 🤓 (Inward-facing cameras, yay.) www.tomsguide.com/computing/sm...

Shasta Indian Nation are getting 2,800 acres of land back on the Klamath River, some of it land ‘which emerged from under the drained reservoirs after the dams came down.’ @gabriellecanon.bsky.social spoke to them about their new role as stewards and landholders. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Excellent news. Credit to @londoncentric.media for the initial reporting. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Ice roads are a lifeline for First Nations, yet as Canada warms, they’re disappearing. Building permanent roads to tiny settlements can cost $100M+. Who would pay? Mines. @hilarybeaumont.bsky.social talks to the communities weighing up the trade offs. grist.org/indigenous/i...

‘Here’s the truth: There’s not enough water in Mono or Owens lake. It’s hotter than it used to be. The sky is dark with wildfire smoke more often. The Sierra Nevada peaks frequently aren’t as snowy.’ @sammyroth.bsky.social goes on a road trip up 395: www.latimes.com/environment/...

Thanks to the @lrb.co.uk for letting me write something about Edmund White, whose work meant a lot to me. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ju...

‘Only a few major sites may continue drawing direct traffic, but that list will shrink. The path forward for publishers, especially local news, will be to produce information specifically for AI systems to ingest.’ Jeez that’s bleak from Brian Morrissey: www.therebooting.com/the-messy-en...